1. Field
Aspects of embodiments of the present invention are directed to a temporal dithering technique used in accumulative data compression.
2. Description of Related Art
Accumulative data, such as numerical data accumulated (e.g., summed) over time has many applications, such as tracking pixel stress in display devices. When the size of the accumulation or the number of the accumulations exceeds the available memory or storage, decisions must be made on how to handle the overflow. Usually such decisions involve a tradeoff of accuracy of the accumulated data versus accumulating less of the data. Assuming accumulating less of the data (to preserve accuracy of that which is accumulated) is not an acceptable option, then preserving as much accuracy as possible with the (overflowing) accumulated data is important.
In many display panel technologies, such as televisions, computer monitors, and other (potentially) large panel display applications, the display panels (and more specifically, their individual pixels) may be driven with bright light output levels and have a long product lifecycle. Without luminance and color stress data compensation, visible differential aging may cause image burn-in (also referred to as image sticking) where the viewer sees historical images that are no longer present in the current image content. While the human eye is not very sensitive toward absolute luminance levels, the human eye is very sensitive to relative luminance differences in a display panel (e.g., even a 10% difference in luminance of the same intended brightness between adjacent areas may be easily detected). To eliminate image sticking, luminance or color stress data compensation may be applied as a countermeasure to aging both for localized areas as well as over the entire screen.
For example, organic light emitting diode (OLED) technology has been applied to television and other large-sized display device applications. In these applications, display panel longevity is potentially an issue. This issue may be exacerbated with increased resolutions that drive current densities to ever-higher values. For example, with brighter screens, usages with fixed data content, or higher resolution screens, screen aging and color compensation technology may become necessary to satisfy user expectations. This may require the storage of a large amount of accumulative data in a fixed amount of storage.